Reply to Anyone Feel Guilty for Isolating Their Kids due to COVID???

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, you're not a terrible mom, and you're also not alone in exaggerating the risks of COVID vs. other risks to your child specifically.  Moving forward, take your daughter to the playground, please.  If *she* wears a mask, even if other kids don't, the risk to her is extremely low.  Risks to children are low anyway, but especially outside.

Moving forward, pay attention to biases and how you think about mental health.  Social isolation to the degree you describe isn't healthy, especially for children, and it's also not necessary given the very low risks COVID poses to children.

I've been following Emily Oster's framework for thinking about COVID risk, which takes into account risk in context.  Too many people are considering only absolute risk and ignoring the risks they take daily for other things, and minimizing risks to mental health (kids are resilient!!!!!).  I understand that COVID is novel and scary, but we've known for a long time that kids are less impacted *and* that being outdoors is reasonably safe, particularly when masked.[/quote]

OMG please not Emily Oster... she is not respected among economists, let alone public health folks. Her early work had some serious issues with data and she was a spousal hire at Brown who later went on to write popular books on the mommy wars. She has no business weighing in on COVID.[/quote]

She has business sharing frameworks for how to think about decisions, which is what I read her for on this issue.  She had the idea of a COVID risk budget, for example, that I found really helpful (and all of our family's risk budget was spent on giving our kids opportunities to socialize).  The idea that you can't do 10 "low-risk" activities is useful, as is the idea to balance one or two low risk (but high reward) activities.  No one's suggesting the OP should have enrolled her daughter in 10 activities, but one or two?  Even one family?

It's all about contextualizing risk, and many people on here and IRL have done a piss-poor job of that, with a ton of mental health stigma to go with it.[/quote]

I also didn’t see a lot of daylight between what Emily Oster was saying and her colleague Ashish Jha over at the Brown School of Public Health. But maybe the Earlier poster is one of the folks that was referenced in The Atlantic as accusing her of “genocide encouragement” for saying families can take trips to see relatives this summer. [/quote]

The earlier poster has lots of family and friends working in ICUs and ERs over the summer. The earlier poster heard a lot of their heartbreak and horror stories. The earlier poster heard enough stories of people dying from those trips and those family dinners, surrounded in their ICU rooms with pictures of those final family reunions, to know that those ideas were a nice way to salve the conscience of people who were mostly doing what they wanted regardless of CDC guidance. And the earlier poster has a lot of friends in public health who worked tiredlessly through the pandemic, in a fog of misinformation and outright attacks driven by foreign agents on our social media platforms. So yes, the earlier poster is done with you and the other deniers of the severity of this situation. [/quote]

I think the earlier poster needs to get some socially distanced fresh air. Oster wasn’t saying gatherings of any size last summer were fine. And even Dr. Fauci has seen his family since March 2020. Risk tolerance is a spectrum. Only leaving the house to get vaccinated and then heading straight back to isolation is one end of that spectrum. But it doesn’t mean anything less than that means you are a denier. [/quote]

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